Why Some Questions Deserve to Stay Open

I have been asking the same question about faith for eleven years, in different forms, at different volumes, and I have stopped needing it answered by Friday. That sentence would have alarmed me at twenty-three, when I assumed doubt was a fire to be put out as quickly as possible before it spread to something structural.

I grew up around a version of belief that treated unresolved questions as slightly dangerous — better to land somewhere, even uncomfortably, than to leave a question standing open in the middle of the room where anyone could trip over it. I understand the impulse. Open questions are uncomfortable to live near. But I've come to think the discomfort was doing something the tidy answer never quite managed.

What the open question was for

A question you're still asking honestly, ten years in, is doing more for you than an answer you accepted too quickly just to make the discomfort stop. The honest question keeps you paying attention. It keeps you reading, talking to people who see it differently, noticing when your own answer starts to feel thinner than it used to. A premature answer, by contrast, tends to calcify — you stop examining it, because examining it again would mean admitting you settled too fast.

I still go to church on Sundays, most weeks, and I still don't have a clean resolution to the question that's been running underneath that habit for over a decade. For a long time I thought that made me a fraud, sitting in a pew with an asterisk next to my belief. I no longer think that. I think the pew is exactly where an open, honest question belongs, being carried rather than solved.

Certainty arrived at too quickly is often just discomfort in a more presentable outfit.

I'm not writing this to recommend permanent uncertainty as some kind of virtue in itself — some questions do deserve resolution, and avoiding that is its own failure of nerve. I'm only saying that not every open question is a problem waiting to be fixed. Some of them are just honest, and honesty, it turns out, doesn't come with a deadline.